Tuesday 3 March 2009

Affiliate Programs - 7 Great Tips



We often get asked by affiliates about how to successfully deal with affiliate programs. There are many ways - and different Internet "gurus" will give you different answers.

Here are the top seven tips that our top consulting editors normally give:

1. Make no mistake about it - merchants and Internet marketers are in business to make money for themselves. They are not interested in helping you to take cash away from them. Their mission is to make as much money as they can - and to give away the minimum they have to. Many merchants and marketers use "tricks" and "tactics" to ensure that they always get the best out of the deal.

2. You must be alert and awake - what tactics are merchants and marketers using to grab your traffic? Many of them will "steal" your traffic and you will not get as much as a simple "thank you" - let alone the bags of cash they all promise.

3. Do you carefully follow what the merchants and marketers tell you? They often give you "helpful advice" so that you may maximize your affiliate income. Here's the sad truth - if you follow them like "blind sheep" - you will increase their profits, not yours.

4. Do you monitor the level of traffic you generate for merchants and marketers? Does this convert to sales and cash? If not, what is happening to your traffic? You need to look into that.

5. Even when you get commissions, don't be too happy. The merchants and marketers will proceed to make 10 to 100 times more out of your traffic than they will ever share with you.

6. You are in business for yourself - when you market and promote affiliate programs, they must generate money and cash flow for your business. If you don't get reasonable returns on your time and cash investment, dump the merchant or marketer. The program is either not worth promoting or the merchant or marketer is abusing your efforts.

7. Promote affiliate programs under your own domain and branding - don't give free advertising to merchants and marketers who may not be interested in rewarding you for your efforts.

About the Author

Consulting Editors, Authors and Mentors - http://www.AskProfessors.com - creators of the Affiliate Intelligence system. Don't throw away money or traffic - get free updates or consult the experts via
http://www.it-news.com/currenta.htm

Your Job As An Affiliate Marketer

As an affiliate, you are effectively a sales person for the site you are directing traffic to. However, to say you are a sales person in the proper sense of the word is not strictly correct, because the selling is done pretty much by the merchant. You see the merchant has already invested lots of money on their product and service, and on their marketing too. Your goal is to effectively deliver traffic to the merchants site who then takes care of everything from that point on. There are two ways you can deliver traffic: a) directly, when you send traffic straight to the merchant's site from its source and b) indirectly, when you first engage the visitor in your own website before sending them to the merchant.

We can summarise your activities as an affiliate as follows:

  • Generate Traffic (Visitors) to Your Site

  • Engage the Visitor and Make a Presell

  • Direct the Visitor By Making a Call To Action (in this case to purchase the merchants product)

  • Ensure the Viewer Returns to Your Site for Future Purchases

AffIiliate Marketing Overview

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business pays commission to an affiliate for every customer they direct to the product site.
  • Probably the quickest way to make money online is to promote someone else's product as an affiliate. You see people have already invested a great deal of time and money in creating their product, and in many cases, have optimized their sales page. This is an ideal situation for us to make money online quickly as we do not have to develop a product.

  • There are several key points to consider when selecting products to promote. I would advise to work with the Clickbank.Com marketplace because they have a huge number of established products to work with, and they also provide also vital statistical information that allows us to determine the probability of success.

  • Once, we have chosen a product all we need to do is to direct traffic to our specific affiliate URL (web address). There are a number of ways to generate traffic, which I will discuss in more detail over the coming weeks. However, free traffic can take time to develop, pay per click is often the first choice because we can drive extremely targeted traffic in a matter minutes.

  • We can either drive traffic (visitors) to the merchant's website through our affiliate link, or we can send the traffic to what we call a "landing page". A page set up by ourselves where we offer reviews on the product. This improves the visitor's experience as they recieve further information that will encourage them to consider purchasing the product. This is a great technique for converting visitors to buyers.

Wednesday 21 January 2009

How to make money online using Clickbank ($400 per month)

I thought I’d share a little experiment I did last month with Clickbank. I signed up for a brand new account & decided to see how much money I could make within a month with just Articles, no ppc or paid advertising.

Since I work a full time job I wasn’t able to really put as much effort into the experiment as I’d liked but the results were somewhat interesting for the amount of time spent working on it.

Here’s what I did:

I picked 10 products from the Clickbank Marketplace which had a gravity of anywhere between 20-100

I did some keyword research on the product, so I looked at the types of keywords people might be using to search for that product. For example, a dog walking guide people may search for “how to walk your dog” etc

I then wrote 2 articles for each product. These took about 15mins to write, so all up I spent probably about 6 hours preparing everything.

I made sure that the articles had keyword rich title tags i.e. “How to Walk your Dog” “How to download games for Zune.”

I did an objective review of each product, so basically I said that normally I’m quite skeptical of these sorts of products but boy was I surprised when blah blah blah. I made sure I gave each product a rating in different categories, i.e. value for money, features & so on.

I added all of the articles to USfreeads, didn’t pay for any to be featured but I’m sure that might provide some sales, that’s something I’ll try for the next update.

Once I’d done that I wanted to get the USfreeads Advert indexed in Google. So I use Bookmarking Demon as usual to Submit to as many social networks as possible. If you’re cheap you can also use Only Wire.

Ok now I wait until the articles are indexed in Google. Once they are I then submit the reviews to Article sites such as Ezinearticles, Goarticles. There’s hundreds of article directories, submit the article to around 10 or so. Make sure that you include links back to your USfreeads advert in the footer with good anchor text (i.e. how to walk your dog).

Wash, rinse & repeat.

You can also make Wordpress Blogs, Blogger Blogs, Squidoo, Hubpages, Myspace Pages & heaps more. But I didn’t on this occasion. Perhaps next time round when I get a bit more time to experiment.

Anyway I thought I’d share my results in using the above technique with a screenshot from the new Clickbank account.

Clickbank Account

Not a massive amount of earnings but not bad for about 10 hours in total work. Now If I was to do the same thing month in & month out I’d be growing the number of articles I have online, growing their inbound links using articles & other sources. Eventually I’d have over 240 articles within a year. These will make me money month after month, not just for the month I write them.

The beauty of this is that the earnings above are probably lower due to the amount of time the pages take to get indexed & ranked. So I plan on increasing the earnings easily by next month.

So for any of you guys out there who are struggling to make any money, it’s not difficult. Don’t just sit there & check your stats everyday wondering why you’re not making any cash. Keep writing reviews, articles & just keep doing it over & over. Eventually you’ll hit a sweetspot & the sales will start to mount up. Once you get a nice tidy Clickbank balance running you can then start pouring that money into other ventures ;)

Article taken from:
http://www.earnersblog.com/400-a-month-with-clickbank-article-marketing/

Saturday 17 January 2009

Make Money With Google Adsense

Adsense is operated by Google. This is a method of advertising that has become quite common on the internet. You will allow Google to place advertisements on your website for them and for other businesses. There is no cost to you. However, in exchange for the space on your website these ads take up, you will earn money each time a consumer clicks a link from an advertisement on your website. This is a great way to generate some extra income. The amount of money you earn will depend on the number of ads you have on your site as well as the amount of traffic on your website.You may be saying this is too easy, what is the catch? It is easy, but there is no catch. This is a great way for businesses to get exposure in various places all over the internet. It also helps them cut down on advertising expenses because they only pay each time a consumer takes a link from a website.

Most other types of advertising cost a set amount regardless of if anyone looks at it or not. This is a great method for new businesses that have a low budget for advertising. The more traffic they can generate to their site, the more profits they will make. In turn they can afford to advertise more.Adsense is a winning situation for everyone. Businesses use it as a low cost way of advertising, website owners use it as a way to earn money, consumers use it as a way to find other products and services they are interested in, and Google uses it as an effective way to earn more money.In fact, Adsense has become so common you will find it on numerous websites just by surfing around the internet a little bit.

Google has a great system in place to determine the best advertisements to place on your website. They will place ads that relate to your products or services offered but not direct competitors. Google is able to determine market trends, customer demands, and evaluate the best ads for your website based on accumulated data that has been analyzed in those areas. This means you have a very good chance of earning money because a great deal of research has gone into determining what consumers are after.

There are many places on your website or blog that you can place Adsense advertisements including your homepage, emails, and anything else you wish to use. You don’t have to sell products or services to benefit from Adsense either. You may have an educational site or information site. Any type of website can be used for Adsense. Remember that the ads will be fitting and related to the type of website you operate.

The process of signing up for Adsense and start earning money is very simple. Just go to www.Adwords.com. You will need to fill out some basic information on an application. Within 48 hours you will get a response telling you if you were approved or not. If you are not accepted you will need to contact them to get a full disclosure of why. It is important to have the application completely filled out as that is the number one reason why websites are rejected. Other reasons include personal websites that are not subjective enough and having a website under 15 pages.

Once your application has been accepted you will have to copy and page an html code into the pages you want ads to show up on. You can choose to display the ads vertically or horizontally on your website. You can even customize the colors to make them match your website better. Online help and customer service is available 24/7 if you have questions or other issues. Adsense is very simple to set up and you can choose to stop being a part of the process at any time. The ads will be relevant to your website yet not direct competitors. You don’t pay anything to become a member of Adsense, so what do you have to lose? For more info on Adsense check out
http://curjam.netsalaries.com/index.cfm?scn=adsense this free review contains other useful info too.
Article written by Terry Detty, 42, who enjoys his time away from work and getting out for a breath of fresh air occasionally.

How To Run An Effective Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign

Using pay per click advertising is essential for any business looking to make money online. There are a number of factors that determine the success or failure of any AdWords campaigns.


In this article, I cover many of the basics associated with effective PPC advertising. Keep in mind that Google isn't the only provider of online advertising. None-the-less, Google AdWords is certainly the most popular.Any good online campaign begins with clear objectives. Are you promoting your business? Asking users to fill out a form? Buy from a jump page? As they say, begin with the end in mind.Once you've established the purpose of your campaign, keep in mind that the number of people seeing your online advertising depends on how well you've chosen your keywords. If you choose a set of unpopular keywords to trigger your PPC advertisement then you shouldn't expect your advertising to be shown very often.Google AdWords provides a traffic estimator as a feature that can give you a sense of expected traffic. You should use this to determine your possible out of pocket costs and what you should expect to spend on a daily basis.

The most important elements of a Google AdWords campaign include:

• Keyword choice. Generally speaking the more targeted, the better. You'll get less clicks but they will be people who specifically want your product or service.

• Advertising headline and text. The headline is the most important of these. Make sure it relates to the keywords you are bidding on - this will help keep the cost of your advert down.

• Display URL. The more relevant this appears to be to the keywords you're bidding on, the better.

• Landing page URL. This needs to be relevant to your keywords and advert. If you're bidding on Britney Spears then you shouldn't be sending people to a page about nuclear physics. It's not relevant and Google will penalize you by charging a lot more for your clicks.

• Per-click Budget. How much are you willing to pay per click? Determine what you are willing to pay per conversion (lead or purchase) and estimate how many visitors it will take for a single conversion.

• Daily Budget. The amount of money you are willing to spend in a 24 hour period. Keep in mind that if you're making money, it's okay to spend money.These are just some of the basics associated with creating a successful AdWords campaign.

The truth of the matter is that being truly successful with Google AdWords takes knowledge and experience. The more you work with pay per click advertising, the better results you'll have.There are tons of books, ebooks, and tools that are available online to help you succeed with your advertising. I recommend picking one up and learning about the components of a successful campaign. That said, nothing can replace the actual experience you get from running your own pay-per-click campaigns. It's easy to open an account on Google AdWords and costs very little to start.
So don't delay and start building real world experience.Michael Fleischner is an Internet marketing expert and author of the
Marketing Tips blog.
There are lots of available ebooks, downloads and courses http://curjam.netsalaries.com/ is a great review site and offers free advice on the best available options available.

Friday 16 January 2009

Guide to money making with blogging

I found this interesting article about how to increase revenue from blogging please take a look.


I’ve been blogging for just over two years, but I’ve only been trying to make money online with blogging for the last 6 months since I lost my day job.

I’ve been very pleased with the results and in 12 months I’ve managed to increase my income from $573 in October 2006 to

15,179 in October 2007 - that’s a 2549% increase in 12 months and an annual salary of over $180,000!

Obviously writing good posts and writing frequently are important, but so is ensuring that when the traffic arrives you are ready to take advantage. I’ve tried to condense into one post all the advertising schemes, site modifications and SEO tweaks I’ve made on my blogging journey that have allowed me to generate a $180K annual salary in just twelve months.

Affiliate Schemes

  • TNX: A new network that is taking the blogging world by storm. Not only does it offer an amazing way for publishers to sell contextual links on their site, it also has one of the best referral schemes available
  • CashCrate: Amazing scheme that allows you to make money directly by completing offers, but also through a brilliant referral scheme - you even get paid for the referrals that your referrals signup. Payout per offer ranges between $1-35 per offer and you get 75% for offers you complete directly, and up to 30% of your referrals earnings.

Advertising Networks

  • Google Adsense: The most popular scheme for bloggers to generate money from their site. The scheme works by serving contextual advertising so a high click-through rate (CTR) is acheivable thanks to ads being served that are relevant to your content. A very generous revenue share of approximately 60-80% is also given

  • Text Link Ads: Another popular scheme with bloggers and for many bloggers it is their biggest earner. Adding your site to Text Link Ads is easy and depending on your Page Rank and traffic up to $300 per month can be earned. One of the advantages of the scheme is that most advertisers automatically renew their campaigns each month
  • Review Me: ReviewMe’s marketplace of advertisers is growing each month who want to pay web authors will review your product or service on their Web site. Payments vary between $50-500 per review, and some bloggers regularly write a couple of reviews each month
Author: Everton from connectedinternet.co.uk

For a comprehensive guide of how to make money on the web, some reviews of great money making programs and the internet scams to be aware of please feel free to check:
http://curjam.thebizreview.net/ it is an excellent source of information.